Category Archives: Internet

Beating the queue

I was wondering how the geekrant.org domain name propagated so fast. Turns out since September, DNS updates have been happening about every five minutes, instead of twice a day.

We also got a quick path on getting indexed by Google, courtesy of using Google’s AdSense, which evidently bumps you to the top of the indexing queue so they can serve more relevant ads.

Speaking of Google, for people in the US, there’s now Google via SMS.

Firefox point and counterpoint

I like Firefox a lot. I use it almost exclusively at home. At work it’s not so easy, as something in its password caching plays havoc with the corporate proxy, hitting it with an old password continually, and constantly locking my account. So IE6 rules the roost there.

But I do have one big problem with Firefox, and the way its development goes. My series of annotated photos on my blog uses little popups to describe things in the pictures. I wanted something easy* to implement, completely standards-based, don’t rely on any hyper-funky overkill technology like Java or Flash, nor on an external service provider like Flickr (which looks really good, but these things have a habit of going west after a few years, and I intend my blog to be online virtually forever, or at least until they prise my credit cards from my cold dead hands).

So I used the <title> tag in the hotspots of the pictures. But Firefox abbreviates long tooltips, rather than wrapping.

This is a known bug in Firefox. It’s been a known bug in Firefox for four damn years. Jeez. Is that a failing of the open source community, that sometimes it can take them so long to agree something needs to be fixed, write a fix, and then get it released? I call that pretty piss-poor. At least with monolithic corporations like Microsoft, some jackbooted Program Manager would have clicked their fingers and had it done by now.

By the way, if you’re playing about in Firefox, but some obscure option you’re looking for isn’t on the dialogs (like when I turned off the closing all tabs warning and couldn’t turn it on again)… then check try about:config in the address field. Very groovy.

*Easy as long as doing HTML hotspots is your idea of fun, or you have a tool that can do them for you.

Update 10/11/2004: This bug is still not fixed in Firefox 1.0. It can be cured using the PopupAlt extension, but that’s not the point. Firefox should work. It shouldn’t be up to individual users to go out hunting for a solution they have to download to get around a known Firefox problem.

A few snippets

Clinging to IE, but wishing there were more security zones, so you can tighten the thumbscrews to varying degrees where appropriate? Add a fifth security zone to IE. (via Greg)

Once upon a time to display JPEGs in DOS, you had to run an obscure JPEG Viewer program, and on my ancient rattling 286, it took a good few seconds to look at the file and actually show it on the (16 colour) VGA screen. Nowadays JPEG display is built into practically everything. Which makes Microsoft’s JPEG display vulnerability doubly-scary. Affected software: just about everything they sell. (Microsoft thanks those who work with them to protect customers, by putting their e-mail address on their web page so they can be bombarded with spam.)

Looking for a freebie FTP client for Windows, but sick of CoreFTP’s vagaries, WSFTP’s oldness (is it even Y2K compliant?), and IE/Explorer’s astounding lack of functionality? FileZilla rocks.

Web Pet Hate #3456

This guy advertises his web design wares ending with the claim ”without frustration, without waiting…’.

So why on earth do I have to sit and read your splash screen before getting in to your site?

New Gmail Features

Gmail, everybody’s favourite web mail, well except maybe for Charles Wright, has just updated with new features.

What’s New at the Gmail help centre tells us that now there is a Gmail notifier (a small windows app that lets you know when new mail has arrived along with its sender and subject), searching contacts has been made easier, you can forward mail to another account and you can save drafts.

Interestingly the mail forwarding feature is ‘free during the test’ which makes me wonder what other premium features are being planned for Gmail.

UPDATE

I’ve just installed Notifier and it has the option to set Gmail as the default sender of email for when you click on mailto: links. Pretty neat if you’re a heavy Gmail user.

Gmail and spam

Ooooooooooh. Seems Age IT writer Charles Wright isn’t too keen on people disagreeing with him. In today’s Age he writes about Hotmail’s cancellation of free WebDav (Outlook/Outlook Express) access (bastards!) and mentions in passing that Fastmail.fm is great (so I’ve heard) and that it’s better than GMail, which has “no spam protection to speak of.”

GMail spam caughtOh. Coulda fooled me. So I left a comment on his blog, mentioning that actually GMail does have spam protection. He replied reckoning yeah but it only catches about 30%. I replied saying it was catching most of mine. This apparently inspired a followup blog entry making note of overzealous Google-lovers writing to him if he criticises the company.

Well, what can I say. I’ve been using GMail for some months now, and feeding it mail addressed to one of my oldest and most spammed email addresses (dbowen at custard dot net dot au, circa 1997). GMail catches most of them. I just logged in after being away for three and a half hours (gasp!) and it’s caught 18 spams — no false positives, none slipped through into my Inbox. It’s not always this good, but I have no major complaints.

Maybe he looked at GMail early on, when the filters weren’t as good. Or maybe he attracts a higher class of spammer than me. Dunno. But it works for me.

…

By the way, anybody want a GMail invitation? They keep giving me lots, and although I’ve tried giving some away via GMail swap sites, they keep on coming back. Leave a comment with your email address in the email field (it won’t display publicly, but I’ll see it).

Sitepoint Anomaly

I’ve been meaning to buy a couple of books from sitepoint for a while now. I’ve borrowed a copy of their HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS, a fantastic guide to CSS and their Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP & MySQL looks great so when they emailed me an offer of 20% off this book I thought why not.

That is until I saw the site. Ifyou spend over USD$70 (effectively two books) you get free postage anywhere in the world. Hmmm. Take the offer and save $7 off one book or reject the offer (which takes me below $70), pay full price and save $15?

Regardless, they’re great books.

Gads

When I look at this site, in the Google Ad I consistently get public service announcements, or more commonly, an advert for a Word to HTML conversion tool.

When I looked at this site at Tony’s place, it came up with ads for AFL memorabilia on eBay.

Interesting, very interesting. Tony’s a big AFL fan, and I can only speculate that Google is doing some tracking of sites visited.

Other ad operators such as DoubleClick got flack when they originally started doing that, serving tracker cookies with their ads, building up usage patterns. I don’t recall hearing about Google doing the same thing, but I wouldn’t be surprised. After all there’s thousands upon thousands of sites using Google AdSense now, plus they could track your Google searches (it’s known that they do use a user cookie to keep your preferences). Might be time to trawl through Google’s T&Cs again.

PS. Okay, I just got an AFL ad. Maybe they’re not tracking?

Okay, we’re running

Obviously in a geek blog, you should blog about how the blog got setup.

Domain name. Geekrant.com and .net were already taken, but .org was free. I registered it with Gandi. They’re a French company, have been around for a while. I think I first encountered them some years ago in a list of domain registrars. At the time they were up near the top of the recommended registrars not only for being reasonably cheap and reliable, but also for having a domain registration policy that precluded all sorts of the kind of legal mumbo jumbo that some other registrars had at the time, which theoretically gave you rather less than complete control over your domain. Whatever the reason I originally went with them, they’ve been good over the years, and provide useful stuff like free domain and e-mail forwarding. At 12 Euros a year, perhaps not the cheapest around, but reliable and quick. Quicker than I thought, actually. I assume Those In Charge have improved the speed of new domain propagation over the last few years, because everything seemed to be done after a couple of hours.

Hosting. The hosting is at Aussie Hosts, a mob in Brisbane who specialise in shared hosting on Linux, and using the Plesk7 web site control software, which is frikkin’ marvellous. I’ve never come across a web control panel quite so useful and user-friendly. It does everything, and is light-years ahead of most of the other very clunky web control panels I’ve seen.

Software. Installing WordPress is dead easy. Upload the files into the http directory, create the MySql directory and its user in Plesk, then run WordPress’s install script. That’s it. It creates all the tables, creates the initial user, and away you go. Then I logged-on to WordPress and created the users, set the various options like comment spam parameters, and structure of permalinks. For the latter it tells you what your .htaccess needs to look like. You just paste it into the file and you’re done. (Admittedly it shat itself the first time I tried it. I wiped it out, and tried it again a bit later. Not sure what was different the second time, but it worked.)

Template. For WordPress’s templates, you basically need to edit: index.php (the main page), wp-layout.css (the stylesheet), and wp-comments.php (the comments section, which for some reason WP’s default installation has quirks like the caption for the comment fields appearing after the fields themselves. Wacky). I’m not entirely a master of CSS yet, so I just fiddled with the fonts and colours, and fiddled a bit with the links and so on. I’ve messed the template up slightly — right now the XHTML validation gets a thumbs-down. Will fix that when I get the chance to look at it.

We started creating a (perhaps over-ambitious) hierarchy of categories for articles to fall into. Hmm. Probably should have just copied out of DMOZ or Yahoo or something. (Just the hierarchy that is. If you look around, it’s incredible the number of directory sites that have swiped content completely from Yahoo.)

Also created a basic logo in my trusty old copy of Corel Photopaint, added in a Google advert to try and recoup some of the hosting and domain name costs, and that’s about it for now. Further fiddling can (and no doubt will) come later.